Our officers have mandated that because of our business relationship with HP, that we buy only HP servers for our x86 needs. HP's array cards are miserably slow, and their fibre SAN solutions are a joke. Our SUN boxes are great, and utilize a nice EMC SAN, but in the Intel side of the shop, we're stuck with HP and their array cards. We have some Windows clusters, but they are an active/passive cluster, and not the needed active/active cluster. Once of these days though...
Windows may take a mere 30 seconds to boot, but if you're dealing with a large raid array, you can often wait 5 minutes or more while the array goes through it's self check upon booting.
For almost 10 years, Plextor has been at the front of the SCSI cdrom business. They're still around, and still selling them. Personally, all I ever buy are SCSI cdrom and cdrw drives, and I've been buying Plextor the whole time. You pay a price premium, but my original 4Plex still works 9 years later.
He's talking about the code needed to port Directx calls to OpenGL calls, which would be needed if you're going to try and move the platform off of Windows.
I have a bp6 with a pair of 366's running 4.5.1. I've thought about purchasing BeOS 5, but from what I understand, you need the more expensive version to get SMP support, and I didn't see a need at the time to upgrade. Now I haven't powered that machine on in a year or so, but I've always thought about getting it up and running again. Does BeOS 5 have any "killer app/features" that would make it worth finding and installing, or is 4.5.1 still fine?
Seeing as how I was downloading at only 28K/s, it was far faster to read than wait for the download to finish. I've since seen the trailer, and it is very cool to watch as well.
Plus, I haven't seen any of the Animatrix, and so the commentary filled in some knowledge gaps I had.
Here in Seattle, most ATMs are running OS/2 or Windows NT4. They seem to be running on standard x86 clones, although all you interface with is the display and a serial port for the keypad.
Windows2k/XP by itself isn't really a problem in an ATM. Attaching said ATM to a wide open network IS a problem. They'll probably stick with the dedicated leased lines, and it'll be about as secure as it was with OS/2 / NT4.
I recently picked up a dell laptop, and I remember being allowed to go into the bios, so I'm pretty sure that the license they are claiming was in the bios was probably actually loaded out of the boot sector on the hard drive.
However, if it truely was something that you had to agree to in order to get into the bios, that's pretty messed up.
Besides doing what the parent poster said, I also first go into the BIOS, and tweak what I can to my liking. For instance, I turn down the default brightness a notch, and turn on the full performance while on battery power. I also enable booting from floppy and cd before hard drives.
Speaking of AUPs... I just signed up at home with Comcast, and they list: "No High-Bandwidth servers". The way I see that, I can't run a porn site off my home box, but hosting a small web server isn't a problem.
Hardware wise, yes, a linux box is far cheaper than a Cisco 2500 router. However, when it comes to support, it's much less expensive to support 1000 Cisco devices than it is to support the same number of linux/bsd routers.
Plus, although I haven't looked for them, I can't recall off hand any Packet over Sonet cards for x86 hardware, which makes the OC48 we have coming in fairly useless.
I run my 21" at 1600x1200, and wish it could do 1920x1440 like my old one could. I prefer small text, as it lets me put quite a bit onto the screen. I rarely find a problem with a website that doesn't scale with my browser window size, but I keep Javascript disabled, so perhaps that has something to do with it.
The area I find problems with, is Windows-based applications that don't allow resizing of their windows. There is nothing more annoying than running an application that is 300x300 pixels, and has a scrollbar to read the text, instead of allowing one to resize the window to display the entirety of the text.
Actually, if you read the page, it says that it only enforces Macrovision on the composite/svideo/component outputs. If you're using the DVI output, it doesn't appear to play Macrovision titles.
You're looking at the wrong Dell laptops then. I was browsing their laptop selection last month, and they have a line of laptops with a good video card, and hast drives/cpus.
The Dell Precision M50 that I ordered is a 2.5 GHz p4, has 1GB of RAM, 2x 60 GB 4200 RPM drives (they make a 7200 RPM as well), a DVD/CDRW drive, and a Quadro4 video card with 64MB of video RAM. They also sell the M60, which is a slower cpu (1.7GHz P4), but takes up to 2GB of RAM, and has the new QuadroFX w/128 MB.
Now that they are offering 7200 RPM hard drives, lots of RAM, and nice x86 workstation quality video cards, your laptop can be just as fast as a desktop for games.
I'm curious as to what $3k IBM compatible PCs you are looking at that doesn't have Gigabit Ethernet, PCI-X and Serial ATA. I just ordered a fricking server that had all that, plus 2x 3.02 GHz Xeons, 2 GB of RAM, Ultra320 SCSI instead of Serial ATA, and it was only 3k. In a 1U chassis.
Having readily availiable clones helped make the IBM x86 PC popular and cheap. Until I can buy mix and match Apple clone parts in a store of online, they won't be as cheap or popular as Intel x86 clones.
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Sadly, I can see how that makes sense, in a roundabout way.
Civ3, Xcom and Nethack.
It ended up being $12.92 (for me) for shipping/handling/tax (although I don't know how they charged tax on a free item).
I wish it were that easy ;)
Our officers have mandated that because of our business relationship with HP, that we buy only HP servers for our x86 needs. HP's array cards are miserably slow, and their fibre SAN solutions are a joke. Our SUN boxes are great, and utilize a nice EMC SAN, but in the Intel side of the shop, we're stuck with HP and their array cards. We have some Windows clusters, but they are an active/passive cluster, and not the needed active/active cluster. Once of these days though...
Windows may take a mere 30 seconds to boot, but if you're dealing with a large raid array, you can often wait 5 minutes or more while the array goes through it's self check upon booting.
[quote]
Shoom... KA-BLAM!
Announcer: "Oh! And the quarterback is toast!
[/quote]
Reminds me of Die Hard and that cheeze ball "geek/hacker" they had in there breaking into the safe.
For almost 10 years, Plextor has been at the front of the SCSI cdrom business. They're still around, and still selling them. Personally, all I ever buy are SCSI cdrom and cdrw drives, and I've been buying Plextor the whole time. You pay a price premium, but my original 4Plex still works 9 years later.
I see you've read the Diamond Age.
He's talking about the code needed to port Directx calls to OpenGL calls, which would be needed if you're going to try and move the platform off of Windows.
I have a bp6 with a pair of 366's running 4.5.1. I've thought about purchasing BeOS 5, but from what I understand, you need the more expensive version to get SMP support, and I didn't see a need at the time to upgrade. Now I haven't powered that machine on in a year or so, but I've always thought about getting it up and running again. Does BeOS 5 have any "killer app/features" that would make it worth finding and installing, or is 4.5.1 still fine?
Seeing as how I was downloading at only 28K/s, it was far faster to read than wait for the download to finish. I've since seen the trailer, and it is very cool to watch as well.
Plus, I haven't seen any of the Animatrix, and so the commentary filled in some knowledge gaps I had.
Very nice work there on writing that.
Here in Seattle, most ATMs are running OS/2 or Windows NT4. They seem to be running on standard x86 clones, although all you interface with is the display and a serial port for the keypad.
Windows2k/XP by itself isn't really a problem in an ATM. Attaching said ATM to a wide open network IS a problem. They'll probably stick with the dedicated leased lines, and it'll be about as secure as it was with OS/2 / NT4.
It couldn't ever be worse. Have you actually spent any time in the US watching what is broadcasted on the "local" channels?
Hit f2 as soon as the laptop powers on.
I recently picked up a dell laptop, and I remember being allowed to go into the bios, so I'm pretty sure that the license they are claiming was in the bios was probably actually loaded out of the boot sector on the hard drive.
However, if it truely was something that you had to agree to in order to get into the bios, that's pretty messed up.
Besides doing what the parent poster said, I also first go into the BIOS, and tweak what I can to my liking. For instance, I turn down the default brightness a notch, and turn on the full performance while on battery power. I also enable booting from floppy and cd before hard drives.
Speaking of AUPs... I just signed up at home with Comcast, and they list: "No High-Bandwidth servers". The way I see that, I can't run a porn site off my home box, but hosting a small web server isn't a problem.
Hardware wise, yes, a linux box is far cheaper than a Cisco 2500 router. However, when it comes to support, it's much less expensive to support 1000 Cisco devices than it is to support the same number of linux/bsd routers.
Plus, although I haven't looked for them, I can't recall off hand any Packet over Sonet cards for x86 hardware, which makes the OC48 we have coming in fairly useless.
I run my 21" at 1600x1200, and wish it could do 1920x1440 like my old one could. I prefer small text, as it lets me put quite a bit onto the screen. I rarely find a problem with a website that doesn't scale with my browser window size, but I keep Javascript disabled, so perhaps that has something to do with it.
The area I find problems with, is Windows-based applications that don't allow resizing of their windows. There is nothing more annoying than running an application that is 300x300 pixels, and has a scrollbar to read the text, instead of allowing one to resize the window to display the entirety of the text.
I think the issue will be that you can only visit the site with IE5+, and can only watch the movies with Windows98+.
Actually, if you read the page, it says that it only enforces Macrovision on the composite/svideo/component outputs. If you're using the DVI output, it doesn't appear to play Macrovision titles.
Unless your corporation actually has half a clue, and keeps firewalls logs, so they can tell who did what.
You're looking at the wrong Dell laptops then. I was browsing their laptop selection last month, and they have a line of laptops with a good video card, and hast drives/cpus.
The Dell Precision M50 that I ordered is a 2.5 GHz p4, has 1GB of RAM, 2x 60 GB 4200 RPM drives (they make a 7200 RPM as well), a DVD/CDRW drive, and a Quadro4 video card with 64MB of video RAM. They also sell the M60, which is a slower cpu (1.7GHz P4), but takes up to 2GB of RAM, and has the new QuadroFX w/128 MB.
Now that they are offering 7200 RPM hard drives, lots of RAM, and nice x86 workstation quality video cards, your laptop can be just as fast as a desktop for games.
I'm curious as to what $3k IBM compatible PCs you are looking at that doesn't have Gigabit Ethernet, PCI-X and Serial ATA. I just ordered a fricking server that had all that, plus 2x 3.02 GHz Xeons, 2 GB of RAM, Ultra320 SCSI instead of Serial ATA, and it was only 3k. In a 1U chassis.
Having readily availiable clones helped make the IBM x86 PC popular and cheap. Until I can buy mix and match Apple clone parts in a store of online, they won't be as cheap or popular as Intel x86 clones.